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hello and welcome to another hit film tutorial i'm tom and today we're going to be learning
about digital makeup specifically the zombies in recent years zombies have become a huge staple
of the horror genre and because of their design you can do these on a low budget but if you don't
have makeup or effects or any specialism with that we have a free way for you to do a zombie
effect this tutorial can be completely followed in hitfilm express i'm going to be working in
pro and mentioning a couple of plugins that you can use to ease your workflow let's get into it
you'll notice that we applied tracking markers to the face area this is because the eyes move
separately and we'll be applying different effects to the eyes so these are the dots
that we'll be tracking and applying effects onto so entering the drop down and hitting the
plus icon this will open up the tracker window now before we track we're going to make sure
that the type is set to double point and then placing the markers over the areas that we want
then punch it track it it's important to note that we kept our actor ollie facing towards the camera
because of this tracking method it's not going to capture the 3d turnarounds if you're interested
in doing a more 3d rotation and movement i highly recommend checking out our tutorial on the zombie
clickers from the last of us or if you're a blender user checking out our cyborg tracking
tutorial once we have this completely tracked and we're happy with the data we then need a layer to
attach this onto a point layer is definitely the preferred head to the new layer icon and create
a point we can name this face track be sure to enable scale and rotation before hitting apply
because zombies don't have tracking markers on their face we're going to need to remove them find
a clear frame of your actor and take a still frame being sure to re-import it back into the timeline
mask an area close to the marker feather it and reposition it over the tracking point
now you can parent this to our point layer depending on how many tracking markers you
actually use you may need to repeat this several times using different tracks now the tracking is
done and the face is clean let's move on to some effects create a new plane and name it veins
mask an area around the face and feather in the generate folder we're going to find and
apply fractal noise change the type to energy and under transform we're going to decrease the scale
just until we got something that looks very veiny once you have a size you like go into
color correction and apply curves being sure to lower the shadows and increase the highlights
we want to make sure that there is nothing but black and white
now that we have the tone that we want let's apply a tint increase the amount to 100 and set
the white to a off skin tone or if you're feeling creative go for a green or blue we're now starting
to get the main design apply a d mult from keying and this will eliminate all the black areas
after your demo apply a mac cleaner if you want to feather the edges or soften those details
now we can apply an invert to reveal that detail again lastly setting the blend mode to soft light
don't forget to parent this layer to our face track he's now looking infected we want to make
him look grubby duplicate this layer and rename it to dirt heading into your fractal noise scale
this up so it creates larger patches let's move the tint down so it's underneath the
invert reset it using control and r or right clicking and change the blacks to a dark red
finally lowering the opacity to about 50 what's great about this effect is that it's not exclusive
to just the face area you can even use this for bytes which i'm i'm sure this is fine
it's fine so far so good but we're not looking undead in the project file we have provided a png
of a skull import this into the composite shot and lower the opacity just so we can see what we're
doing using position scale and rotation move this into place so it's over your actors face all we're
going to do now is mask the areas that we want to keep i'm going to keep the nose and cheekbones
then increasing the feather to help the blend we can now turn up the opacity and
that's a little bit saturated and don't forget to parent the skull to our face
track currently it stands out far too much so we're going to be using the levels histogram
to help blend what the levels effect does is very similar to the curves you can control the shadows
highlights and also the separate rgb colors by playing around with the gamma and black
and white levels you can adjust the skull so it fits better with your actor i personally find it
easier to blend a black and white image you can do this by going into the options tab and down to
color channels then selecting which channel that you want to enter red green and blue what this is
doing is giving you a clean slate so all you have to focus on is blending a black and white image
you need to make sure that the tones are similar to the surrounding area this may take some time
so do play around with the different levels as your scene may be very different to mine
once you're feeling confident head back into the color channels and go back to rgb we're
looking better but if you go and apply a hue and saturation effect and dial down the saturation
by about 20 this should help it stand out less another thing to help compositing is to apply a
small blur effect just something very subtle that can blend with your camera's softness now that we
have this skeletal structure let's make some shadows create a new plane layer named shadows
mask the two eye areas being sure to give it enough feather to blend in this time around we're
going to mask each eye going to the controls panel and setting these two masks to subtract
now set the blend mode to soft light and dial the opacity down to 50 percent he's still looking
rather tanned right now so one last thing that we can do is go to the new layer icon and create
a grade layer we can name this pale once more mask the area that we want parent this to our
face track and all we're going to do is apply a hue saturation lightness and just dial down the
saturation from here you can apply any effect that you want scars burns eye effects the final result
is the dawn of the dead and if you're wondering how to do those zombie eyes i highly recommend you
checking out our fantasy eyes tutorial javert breaks down how to do everything from demons
to witches fantasy warlocks and more it's a great tutorial and one i would recommend to enhance this
zombie makeup so go check it out and that is how you can create a digital undead i really do hope
that you've enjoyed this tutorial and it's been of use to you we would love to see anything that you
guys are working on on our discord we have finally set up a discord and we couldn't be happier with
it it's a perfect place to share your work with the community get feedback and get involved with
other creatives we have loved seeing everyone's work up to press so head on over share yours and
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that you want to know leave us a comment we'll see to it and i will see you in the next tutorial